>I always say that important scientific discoveries arise from better tools
I dunno, from Archimedes to Newton, and from Maxwell to Einstein, most important scientific discoveries arose from thinking breakthroughs (and led to better tools, as opposed to having been caused by them). The "better tools" at most helped verify it after it was expressed, not reach it.
It's the incremental, evolutionary stuff, that's mostly helped by better tools...
Actually he is correct, the phenomenon that experimental physics seems to be lagging theoretical physics is a quite recent one. It's also largely based on a small subset of fields that seem to get most of the attention. There are a lot of fields (such as nonlinear dynamic systems) where our theoretical understanding still significantly lags experimental observations.
You can think up "breakthroughs" all you want, it's easy. As any mathematician or software developer can confirm, it's easy for a human to propose an explanation and immediately convince themselves of its correctness; validating hypotheses is hard work that the brain desperately tries to avoid. And in physics, validating things on paper can only get you so far - you ultimately need experimental confirmation to make solid science.
Here is where technology becomes necessary: in order to favor one hypothesis over the other, you need to find where they give conflicting predictions, and then check what actually happens in reality. That's only possible when you can perform the necessary experiment and observe the results with sufficient precision to discriminate between competing explanations. Technology is what gives you this capacity, expanding the scope of experiments you can run.
As someone else mentioned, you could drop Einstein back a few hundred years and his work would be laughed off - because ultimately there would be no way to tell if he's right or not. The theory may look beautiful (if complex) on paper, but if you can't discriminate between it and alternatives through an experiment, it's meaningless and you may as well use the simplest model that fits all your current observations.
> The "better tools" at most helped verify it after it was expressed, not reach it.
While they do so, they validate the said scientific breakthroughs. Science is not only about coming up with models or hypotheses. Science is "theory and validation." Take out either of them, and you don't have science.
Humans have been theorizing and creating mental models for thousands of years. But only with the better tools were they able to select verified models, and discard those that didn't fit the observation, and as a consequence, make more and more sophisticated and accurate predictions.
To take two recent examples, the first photograph of the black hole and the first detection of gravitational waves (both predicted by Einstein's GR, coincidentally) required a stupendous amount of collective brainpower of brilliant engineers and scientists. 100% of that brainpower went into figuring out building those better tools and analyzing the collected data. The scientific community itself has acknowledged the criticality of those better tools, 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for building a "better tool" to observe gravitational waves, LIGO [1].
This is not to say that theory isn't important but to call out that observational tools are not "at most help verify theory" but are an integral part of science.
There is, of course, a way to validate theory within its own framework and that is what mathematicians do. I guess the philosophy is a similar domain, but I have not read much about it, so I can't comment much.
On a related note, I highly recommend this panel discussion about the topic of GW, LIGO etc., from the horses' mouth. LIGO is absolutely mind-blowing, a testimony to collective human ingenuity [2].
hmmm, how about "no". It really boils down to how you define science. If you define science as "published in peer reviewed journals" or "knee-deep in academia", the statement is correct. If, however, it's knowledge based on observation of phenomena (literally what science means), preferably with understanding why things happen (having a theory), it's so wrong, it's not even funny - it's a very dangerous standpoint, because the alternative to the scientific method is magic thinking and cargo cults.
Engineering existed way before any kind of math or symbolic manipulation. It was a collection of heuristics.
Information theory came after people were already sending signals over the wire. Similarly, there were architectural feats before geometry or Newton’s laws were discovered.
was it not based on knowledge based on observation (science)? You don't need math and symbolic manipulation, not to mention information theory to do science, even if it helps immensely if you do use these tools!
But we're not talking about just abstract principles. By themselves, these abstract principles are just that - abstract. They only matter when applied to the concrete, when you use them to learn something new about reality.
Technology is how we extend the set of things to which these principles can be applied, and thus the set of things we can learn about our world.
in purely positivistic viewpoint you are probably right, however you seem to be taking inductive approach (use principles to learn) as opposed to the deductive one (use learnings to extract principles). I wouldn't actually dismiss any of them.
edit: re-read your comments again, and i see your point now. You are absolutely right.
I dunno, from Archimedes to Newton, and from Maxwell to Einstein, most important scientific discoveries arose from thinking breakthroughs (and led to better tools, as opposed to having been caused by them). The "better tools" at most helped verify it after it was expressed, not reach it.
It's the incremental, evolutionary stuff, that's mostly helped by better tools...